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“They always watch curling and they’re like, ‘Why did you do that?’ or ‘You better smarten up,’” she says, laughing. “I definitely feel their love and support.”

The fact that Einarson, who skips one of Canada’s top rinks, has to take that job to make ends meet is a challenge for Curling Canada. It’s one of many the national body is grappling with in pursuit of the Olympic and world medals that Canadians expect but are increasingly hard to deliver.

Canada left the 2018 Olympics without a men’s or women’s curling medal (they won gold in the debut of the mixed doubles event) for the first time since the sport was included in 1998. Teams skipped by Einarson and Brendan Bottcher, a chemical engineer by day, also missed the podium at the world championships this year.

It used to be that Canada could expect to face four or five good international teams with about a 70 per cent probability of defeating them, says Curling Canada high performance director Gerry Peckham. “Now when we go to a world championships or an Olympics, virtually every team we play against, it’s much closer to being 50/50.”

Canada’s historic dominance is over and there’s no easy route to get it back, experts say.

Spending less time competing and more in high-quality training environments could be one way. After all, that’s what the countries beating Canada are doing, Peckham says.

But pretty much everything about how curling works in this country prevents that from happening.

Teams aren’t centralized. They operate as self-contained businesses. They have to compete to chase points throughout the season to get into the big tournaments, to get the television eyeballs they need to attract and keep their sponsors. As Einarson says, “If it wasn’t for our sponsors we wouldn’t be able to do this.”

Even if the teams could find the time and money to focus more on training, they would still have to compete extensively just to represent Canada on the international stage.

Canada has more curling depth than any other nation on earth. That’s a sign of a healthy sport, but when viewed purely through a medal-winning lens it’s also “our Achilles,” Peckham says. That’s because it forces teams to devote themselves to the task of beating each other, rather than preparing to take on the world.

The culmination of that “win to be in” process will play out at the Canadian Olympic trials in Saskatoon from Nov. 20 to 28. The top nine men’s and women’s rinks will battle for the right to wear the maple leaf at the Beijing Games in February.

It makes for an exciting event. But just two months later, the winners will be thrust into a competition with the highest of stakes against international teams of full-time curlers — selected and financially supported by their countries long in advance of the Games. Their competition schedules will have been managed to peak; their training specifically tailored to win when it counts most.

For decades, Canada’s “survival of the fittest” model has contributed to a thriving club system, created the best competition circuit and produced Olympic medal winners. Canadian curling and its culture is built on those three legs.

But the international trend of selecting and training athletes with one podium performance specifically in mind is testing Canada’s model and, as results increasingly show, it’s not keeping pace.

But how to fix one leg of Canada’s system without damaging the other two?

“That’s obviously the million-dollar question,” says Rick Lang, a two-time world champion and former national team coach. “I do believe that a change of culture around how teams prepare themselves is necessary.”

Lang now coaches Krista McCarville’s Northern Ontario rink and thinks their experience provides a small window into the performance-enhancing potential of focused training. They compete just a fraction as often as the other top teams in the country, but he says they’ve shown what can be done through training by earning a spot at the Olympic trials for the third time.

Canada’s top teams would also benefit from training together to learn from experts and each other, Lang says. Alberta skip Brendan Bottcher calls that a sound principle — but impossible.

“If we all shared a little more with each other, we could beat the international teams more,” he says. “But because we spend our whole season trying to beat each other, to get to the worlds or the Olympics, that will never happen. We’re all trying to hold on to any secret we can.”

Bottcher would like to see the teams Canada sends abroad given more time to prepare so they can deliver their very best, because anything less won’t be enough to win.

“We hold our national championships, our Brier and our Scotties way too close to the world championships, and we host our Olympic trials way too close to the Olympics,” he says.

The selection process leaves Canadian teams exhausted and less prepared than other international teams, something he knows first hand from his three-week turnaround between winning the Brier and competing at worlds three weeks later.

“If you knew a year in advance you were going to the Olympics, people would take sabbaticals from work, they would get unpaid time off. They would do whatever they needed to be ready. When you only have two months notice, you just can’t do that. There’s no time.”

Curling Canada knows that sending teams to take on the world right after a gruelling selection process isn’t ideal. Earlier selections would also let the organization focus more of the funds from Own the Podium on the teams actually going to the Olympics. But the championships and trials are on the calendar where “it makes sense to our event business model and our television partners,” Peckham says.

The current system also drives athletes to local clubs, gets them on planes to compete and gives them a reason to “dream and aspire” to represent their country — all things that Curling Canada wants to keep.

This is the challenge of making changes to the three-legged stool that supports the Canadian curling system.

“We are going to have to hit the pause button sooner rather than later and determine whether we’re going to sustain this model,” Peckham says. “Are we going to make modifications to it? Or are we going to go off in another direction because international medals mean more than anything else we aspire to achieve in curling?”

Whatever change comes, it’s not likely to please everyone, Einarson says. For now, she’s grateful that she’s can balance all the elements that have made it possible to get to the Olympic trials and curl for a chance to wear the maple leaf in Beijing.

“My job lets me chase my dreams. Not everyone is able to do that.”